I’ve made it 10 weeks straight! That’s something to celebrate! Sorry this week’s podcast got posted a little later than usual. Thursday was Yoko and my 9th annversary so we’ve been sort of celebrating over the past few days. I used the following songs this week: God Of This City, You Said, and All for Love. The R-09HR seems to be picking up certain frequencies more so than the R-09 when I have it positioned on the piano music stand. I’m not sure what’s causing this – could just be the difference in the internal mics. I did EQ a bit so the end result isn’t too shabby. Next week I hope to spend some time finding the “sweet spot” for the R-09HR so hopefully Week 11 will sound better. Also, I think the cooler weather is starting to affect my piano. The lower register is beginning to sound out of tune. What do you think? It was tuned March of this year and I normally can go a year between tunings, but I figured this would probably change once I started this blog. I’ll see about having the tuner over sometime in October after we get a couple of more cold fronts.
Last night, Soundwave played at a “See you at the pole” rally at the First Assembly of God church of Lockhart, and the place was packed! As we ministered with music, you could almost see the life change happen right before your eyes. This is why even with my family, work, church, this blog, and everything else going on in my crazy busy life right now I cannot turn down the opportunity to be a part of Soundwave. God put me on this planet to use my gift to glorify Him and bring people closer to Him through music, and I will jump at any opportunity to do just this. There is nothing like being amongst hundreds of youth on fire for God!
Please excuse the quality of this pic. It was provided by Micah, who is the official “Soundwave” sound dude, and all he had was his Motorola Q. Lighting wasn’t very good either.
Joe, a good friend of mine from church, was able to record this past Sunday’s service at The Connection Church, and the audio and video turned out surprisingly well. He used external mic’s placed on either side of the auditorium, so there is a lot of “room” sound.
The R-09HR still seems to be picking up a great deal of background noise. I’m not sure what the cause of this is, but I apologize in advance if it bothers you. I still need to play around with the sample rate and limiter functions. I hope to get to this before next week’s podcast. Also, from here out I’ll wait till after 9:00 or 10:00 PM to record since mornings and afternoons end up being too noisy. This week, instead of me mentioning the songs that influenced the MTPB music, I’m going to ask if anybody recognizes any of the songs that were used – just leave a comment if you’d like. I pray this week’s podcast is a blessing to you. Take care!
The first recording ended up being a mess for some reason. I figured it was a bug with the limiter so I upgraded the firmware on the new R-09HR and turned the limiter off. I recorded another 30 minutes which ended up being a mess as well due to all of the settings being restored to factory defaults. The third recording went okay, but I don’t think it sounds like it should partly because of all the background noise. At one point you can hear my iPhone get a text and it was upstairs in the theater room. When it went off, it sounded like it was sitting next to the recorder. I guess I still have some learning to do with this new recorder, but I made some good progress the past couple of days. Also, I think my piano is starting to get out of tune which doesn’t help matters any. All that aside, this podcast should definitely suffice for some good prayer time which is what this is all about anyway. This podcast is all original – I used some worship songs the first couple of passes, but ended up leaving them out the third time. God bless!
I tried to incorporate more of the requests from a while back, but things didn’t really work out as I had planned. I did play a “Ron” version of “Somebody” which Micah requested, but didn’t really get to any of the others. In fact, the request fulfillment process for me has been kind of a distraction so I’ll probably stick to playing what comes to heart from here out. I did also play “We Fall Down” and “Amazing Grace” – the Chris Tomlin version.
I finally got to the song suggestions. Sorry it took so long. I only used 2 of them – one from each comment left in the blog posted a couple weeks back. The songs are “El Shaddai” and “You Raise Me Up”. It was fun working these two songs into this week’s podcast. Thank you Micah and Cindy for your suggestions – I will try to use the other songs you mentioned in future podcasts.
This was another full week for me so I didn’t get to incorporate last week’s requests in this week’s podcast. This is just me playing a new song to the LORD. I feel that the past two weeks may have suffered a little bit due to my crazy schedule. Studying for the CISSP has consumed every ounce of free time I’ve had the past week or so. My test is in less than 48 hours and I still have a ways to go on my study. I wasn’t going to let this exam keep me from doing a podcast though. The tempo is a little faster than what I normally play which somewhat reflects what’s been happening in my life lately. I hope you enjoy it – if not, there’s the other podcasts and the old album 🙂 Till next week!
I wasn’t able to incorporate any of the song suggestions from last week – I am very sorry. This week was one of the busiest for me so far this year. So much stuff is going on right now in my life. Lots of really big changes potentially. I’ll have to blog about it sometime after the dust has settled. Well, I didn’t really have time to select any songs to play. I just sat down and started playing, and aside from a few distractions here and there, it was really nice to slow down, relax, and offer up some worship to my LORD.
Just in case anybody would like to submit a request this week – here is the blog to use. Just so you know – I’m not holding my breath since we’re 0 for 2 now ;-). The same disclaimer applies this week as the previous weeks. Because of the way this week is shaping up, I probably won’t be able to record this week’s podcast till Saturday around noon so there is some time to post a request or suggestion if you’d like, and I’ll do my best to work it in.
Once again, there were no song requests so I picked Mighty to Save, Beautiful the Blood, and Shine. I didn’t really play Shine – maybe the chord progression of the chorus, but I really feel that this podcast is the best so far. There were probably a few more mistakes than the past two weeks, but I really felt the Presence of God while I was playing, and I truly believe that you will experience God’s Presence as well while you listen to this week’s podcast and pray…
I’ve added a calendar of all the events I will be playing at throughout the month. As you can see, August is going to be a very busy month for me – probably one of the busiest with regards to playing piano/keyboard. I’ll do my best to keep this calendar updated. There is one event in particular I wanted to bring to your attention. Soundwave will be playing at The Grove in Southpark Meadows at 12:00 PM next Friday, August 15th for an event hosted by 102.3 “The River”. We will be playing for 45 minutes and there is a small chance that some of our show may be on the air so please be sure to listen in if you can’t make it in person. This is going to be a great show!
Last week, I blogged asking if anyone had any praise and/or worship songs they would like to hear incorporated in the next recording I do. The response was OVERWHELMING! Ok, so I’m exaggerating just a ‘lil bit, but I figured I’d give ya’ll another chance to put in song requests for this week’s posting.
The usual disclaimer: I cannot promise to use every request since there were SO many last week :-), but if there are any, I will print out a list and place it somewhere I can see while I play.
A lot of you probably already know this because the “podcast” link has been in the side bar for the past few days now, but I just wanted to make an official announcement that the podcast of the weekly the Music to Pray by blog is now available here at the site, the iTunes store, and Podcast Alley. If you enjoy the music, please take the time to leave a review at the iTunes Store, or vote at Podcast Alley. It’d be much appreciated and contribute to spreading the word about this new resource. I honestly believe this could be a tool used to encourage and inspire people to pray so the let’s get the word out! Thanks in advance!
I just wanted to talk about the recent music post and bring a couple of things to your attention. There are a few things that are different between week 1 and week 2’s recording. On the Roland R-09, I used the auto gain control with a low mic gain setting for week 2 whereas with week 1, AGC was off, and I had the mic gain set to high. This resulted in a more balanced recording with much less overhead to work with so a lot of noise was induced when I normalized the track. Thanks to Micah Petrea‘s hookup last night, we were able to reduce the noise a little. I also used 24 bit 48k during week 2 vs. 16 bit 44.1k for week 1. Of course, I compress to mp3 at 192kbps using VBR after touching up a little, but some would argue starting with a higher quality signal can make a difference. Next week, I’ll try AGC with the mic gain up and see what happens. If you’d like, comment here which week sounds better in your opinion.
Since there were no song suggestions, the following were randomly chosen: God in this City, Hosannah, and Undone. It may be a bit challenging to sing along since the songs are barely recognizable within this week’s blog/podcast, but the whole purpose of this is to inspire prayer anyway so I think we’re good. Be blessed, and I hope you enjoy listening to this week’s music. Till next week!
Well, there are 4 days left before the next audio blog will be recorded and posted, and I’ve been trying to think of ways to keep this idea fresh. Something I came up with was to see if anyone had any praise and/or worship songs they would like to hear incorporated in the next recording I do which will be posted sometime this Saturday. If you have any ideas, please comment and I will work it in IF I can.I can’t make any promises, but if there are any requests, I will print out a list and place it somewhere I can see while I play. I believe this could add something to the whole MTPB experience. Sometimes hearing a familiar song during prayer can just create an environment for worship!
I’ve installed a plug-in for the MTPB blog that has specially designed views for the iPhone and other mobile devices. It has a great look on the iPhone:
I also verified that the MTPB music can be streamed directly to the iPhone so it isn’t necessary to download the audio into iTunes first, although, buffering the most recent audio blog over the Edge network or even 3G for that matter could take quite a bit of time. It only took about 5 seconds over WiFi though. Drop a comment if you were able to stream the music using a mobile device other than the iPhone – I’d love to hear about it. Podcasting will be coming soon! There just aren’t enough hours in the day…
Please keep in mind that this music is meant to be used during prayer time, and please excuse any background noises or mistakes you might here. I pray that this music ushers you into the presence of God as you pray. I know it has for me. Be blessed!
Just finished posting the original Music To Pray By album here. Feel free to download all of the tracks and use them however you’d like. The MTPB blog will be similar only an acoustic grand piano will be used, and the recording will not be broken down into tracks. I hope you enjoy the album!
Last week, I blogged asking if anyone had any praise and/or worship songs they would like to hear incorporated in the next recording I do. The response was OVERWHELMING! Ok, so I’m exaggerating just a ‘lil bit, but I figured I’d give ya’ll another chance to put in song requests for this week’s posting.
I just wanted to talk about the recent music post and bring a couple of things to your attention. There are a few things that are different between week 1 and week 2’s recording. On the 
